Using an SNES emulator on a standard def TV

[Sonikku]

I've tried SNES9X and ZNES and they all have boat loads of filters and visual tweaks, yet all of them look horrible. Is there any way to recreate their original look on a regular television? I output to my 480i flatscreen through an S Video cable from my video card. 640x480 seems to be the lowest resolution I seem to be able to output to the tv through catalyst control center. Would super nintendo games look better if I created an even lower 240p res? For that matter, is there any SNES emulator that has a true "tv mode"? All of them seem to want to do high res computer monitor zoomed in scaling shit that looks like crap.

 

[purbeast0]

i used to run emulators on my modded xbox. looked just fine.

 

[IGemini]

Bsnes might be an emulator to look at for accuracy.

 

[Rage187]

Snes9x has a scan line option I believe.

 

[Sonikku]

i used to run emulators on my modded xbox. looked just fine.

How about on a Windows PC?

 

[IGemini]

I run mine at native res, they look okay. I found the best results with the HQ4x filter. Aliasing is a reality with old console games but this smooths out a lot of it.

I can't stand the scan lines, those things on old-school CRT TVs gave me a headache.

 

[Pia]

Snes9x has a scan line option I believe.

Why would you emulate scanlines when the display is a real CRT?

On LCDs the best image quality comes with integer scaling (= the picture gets windowboxed, hopefully not too much depending on your native res) and good scanline emulation. HQ4X, etc. smoothing filters look horrible. Sorry I can't get to my PC right now to check emulator and settings info.

 

[Sonikku]

I don't understand why it's so difficult to run an emulator on a Windows PC and output it to an old standard def tv over S video and get a look comparable to the original. I can't even get them to go full screen on my tv, selecting full screen just warps it into an ugly ass image on my 16x9 1080p LCD. (I'd probably have to play ridiculous games with catalyst control center making my 480i tv my primary dispaly to get around that crap) These emulators sure are hell bent on using their ugly filters and scaling on a high resolution display, when just running them as they were made to run a tv should be painfully simple.

 

[Ross Ridge]

The closest you're going to get is 640x480 with simple 1x or 2x scaling.

The basic problem is that computer video cards handle TV out differently than the Super Nintendo did. The SNES outputs interlaced NTSC simply doubling lines (if necessary) and adding a border to pad the output to the full 525 lines. Every output line corresponds to a single line of rendered pixels.

Video cards on the other hand stretch the source pixels to fill the output resolution meaning the that each output line may not correspond to a single line of rendered pixels. 640x480 is close to the 488 lines the NTSC standard officially says should be visible, but CRT TVs can vary considerably how many lof the 525 lines are actually visible on screen. Video cards generally have adjustments for their TV outputs so you can match the actual number of visible lines so you don't have stuff cut off or an unnecessarily large border around everything. You might be able to adjust things so it stretches a 640x480 display into 480 lines, but it's still probably not going to result in pixel perfect output.

Note that if you hooked up a real SNES to a LCD TV it won't look it did on an old CRT TV. The LCD TV will do its own scaling up its native resolution, and it's not going to do a better job of what the emulators are capable of.